Tomorrow We Will Run Faster

I found Waldo.

He said he’d been running for as long as he could remember. When I asked him about his childhood he flinched. I’d obviously hit a nerve. Waldo said he didn’t know why he ran, just that he had to.

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Michael Richards was an interesting one.

I turned up early for our interview and was surprised to find Richards talking to the Reverend Jesse Jackson. He was telling him how awesome he thought Michael Jordan had been in the movie, Space Jam, and any sequels that there may have been. After Jackson left, Richards’ face crawled to an aching spite and he told me that to gain his trust I had to hate black people more than he did. When I failed in this, Richards said he couldn’t help me. As he made ready to ride off with his horse into an unfolding horizon, he trapped my eye in his studied Rain Man gaze and softly, sang,

‘Blue sunset, blue sunset,

Sets long in the hue of you.

Blue sunset, blue sunset,

Shines on in the hearts of a few”

When I asked him what that meant, he threw back his head and laughed. I could see wires among his hair. An unsettling chill caught about my neck. He rode off, wrapped in that laugh and I stood there watching, rooted to the spot, ‘till he was no more than a speck of sand.

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Time was indifferent.

On the one hand, Time appeared ready to open up, but on the other, I sensed a detached ambiguity towards me. She sat, with her translator, an alarm clock, on my studio sofa. I wondered about their relationship. It was written that Time knew everything. When I asked her how that felt, she just nodded. I looked to the translator who omitted a series of measured ticks. I tried to make some sense of it but understood little.

Time wore a nightgown the size of the sky. I got the feeling she was waiting for something.

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Aids coughed into a napkin.

Aids felt more comfortable talking manifest in the form of a dog with rabies. Wearing a muzzle (not seen in the picture) I found a very honest and open syndrome, sometimes sad but always hopeful. My main query was with Aids as an extension of comedy. I put it to Aids that it was no longer funny, that the market had become inflated and bland, that it was just a shitty punch line now. To my surprise, Aids agreed. He told me about his work in the 80’s, spreading fear among a gay scene that wouldn’t stop partying. “The Golden Years”, he called them. He’d been grateful for the recognition after years of being overlooked in the West for his work in Africa and other developing countries but now it was like he’d become a victim of his own success.

Aids and I spoke on the balcony of his East Village apartment. We were sat in deck chairs with a direct view into the aerobics class of an adjacent building. Aids said spandex was still a stupidly gay material; I sipped from the coffee we were sharing.

I asked him of the new kids on the block. Bone-marrow cancer had potential, he said, but it’d have to be ready to deal with the fallout of the fame that would come with it, if and when. We watched the people working out a little while longer and then I left, coughing and sneezing into a napkin.

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The children of Nairobi were on an exchange trip…

So I can’t pretend they were representative of the entire child population of Nairobi. It was raining. We were at a holocaust museum. The kids were laughing as they walked between exhibits. It struck me as strange. I asked their teacher, Umbeye, if they knew about the horrors of the holocaust or suffered limited English and were instead joking about other things. He said that they were fluent English speakers but that they found the holocaust funny. I pressed Umbeye to expand on this and he pointed, smiling, towards an elevator. “Clean up, funny-time”, he said, still smiling. Could he have meant showers? We walked around like this for the whole afternoon, the kids laughing, with Umbeye and me talking together. We took a lunch break in the museum canteen sometime after three. As we were getting up to leave, Umbeye said something, and the kids started screaming with laughter. I don’t speak Swahili so the joke was lost on me.

When our time was up and we were saying our goodbye’s I decided to tackle Umbeye and the children on the object of their amusement. I drew out an allusion to the limited coverage of the Kenyan civil war in Western media and asked if they found the holocaust funny in a kind of comparative way.

“No”, said a pretty girl with her hair in bunches, “that’d be satire. And bad satire at that. For us, for the whole of Kenya, and particularly Nairobi, the holocaust is just, you know, really, really funny”.

I left with their laughter ringing in my ears.

The last I saw of them they were rolling about in giggling fits at the feet of a memorial inscribed with the names of holocaust victims.